Introduction to Deploying on PaaS
Learn how to deploy applications to PaaS.
Deploying on Cloud
Deploying applications and managing their processes can be tedious. As we have seen in The WSGI Protocol lesson, you need to setup and configure a WSGI-compliant Web server to serve your code. Managing servers to serve your application can be hazardous and tiresome, especially if it is not your specialty. I am not even mentioning the security concern and the overall maintenance you will have to take care of.
Platform as a service, or PaaS for short, is a cloud computing service that provides hosting for your application. It allows managing your deployment without the complexity of building and maintaining the needed infrastructure. Those platforms usually offer interesting features, such as relational database system management and auto-scaling.
They are exciting alternatives to the classical server of virtual-machine deployment, because if you are only a small team of developers with no expertise yet in infrastructure, this can help you save a lot of time.
There are a number of platforms as a service out there. It would not be practical to cover them all in this course. However, it is interesting to demonstrate what kind of ease they can provide, we will discuss a few of them in the following sections.
Tip: Most of those platforms are not free but offer a free-tier that allows you to test them.
Coding Challenge: Building REST API
Heroku